"Through an ambitious structure reflecting his own war-torn psyche, Prcic expertly mines his pain like a reporter inside his own wounds, sending out dispatches of reckless intimacy and dazzling humor, the wild and particular pyrotechnics of his grief-deranged heartwreck on glorious display. I found not only solace and camaraderie in his longing for homes lost, but the inspiration to continue on in the face of profound sorrow. It's a berserker, bravura performance of a busted and booze-soaked heart sorting through its own broken pieces to survive, of a man battling back from the brink(s) with humor, swagger, and just enough crazy to keep going. In short—an absolute triumph." —Matt Sumell, author of Making Nice

"Ismet Prcic writes as if every window in the house is open to the wind, years of pages blowing about, and there's only time to grab from the air the scenes that really matter, the ones written with such candor and boldness of mind that they can't get lost. They are too necessary. Unspeakable Home is a profound novel of extraordinary emotional honesty." —Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need

"Unspeakable Home is fierce and unforgettable, forged in the heart. It is a darkly funny, surprising, and sad accounting of the Bosnia that broke the refugee-narrator, and of the phantom actor he became on the California set. Home, love, self—Prcic, the drinker, puts a match to it all in scorching scenes that sear the eyes. And still, there is promise of return." —Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood

“Reading Unspeakable Home is humbling, unnerving, and reading it also gives audition to a voice that might otherwise be screaming alone. A novel as powerful as Last Exit to Brooklyn and as necessary, with a manifold character who refuses 'the chaos of anonymity or silence.' A brilliant and deadly serious comic novel." —Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow and She

“After a dramatic escape from war in Bosnia, a quieter violence begins: the character of Izzy finds that his heart, body and head are littered with landmines and craters, that beginning again will not be as simple as waking up in America. Unspeakable Home is an insistent and steady stitching together of manhood, selfhood, humanness. Here is light and humor and love and storytelling. Ismet Prcic delivers a heart-lifting portrait of the almost fantastical act of continuation and repair.” —Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal

“Unspeakable Home is a deep dive to the bottom of the ocean we call memory in an effort to recover the will to live. Ismet Prcic invents a language for travel with lyric precision, from the point of view of a refugee in exile, creating a point of view pieced together from soul shards. The war zones are literal and symbolic: Bosnia, childhood, love, the bomb laden terrain of addiction. What emerges, astonishingly, is a love song.” —Lidia Yuknavich, author of Thrust

"If there is a writer who has written more powerfully, more searingly, more bravely about trauma, PTSD, and alcoholism—they have not survived the telling. Ismet Prcic shows us the inside of this cunning, baffling, and powerful disease—one that has claimed so many brilliant writers, and also made living with them nearly impossible. A book that is insane, insatiable, sometimes very funny, tragic, and ultimately beautiful. It is a book that crosses the globe, and in that crossing, delineates a wide swath of the human heart." —Pauls Toutonghi, author of Red Weather, Evel Knievel Days, and The Refugee Ocean

Select Praise for Shards

“Impressive . . . Inventive . . . Pushes against convention, logic, chronology . . . Ambitious and deep . . . [Prcic] succeeds at writing an unsettling and powerful novel.” —Dana Spiotta, New York Times Book Review

“Irresistible . . . Fierce, funny, and real.” —Teresa Budasi, Chicago Sun-Times

“So gripping and shaking that there will be no casual readers of this book.” —Y. S. Fing, Washington Independent Review of Books

“Brilliant . . . With verbal glee, Prcic serves up a darkly comic vision of the terrors and misunderstandings of immigration. Tight, glorious little tales-within-tales abound, rattled off with a quick, artless naturalism. . . . The writing is packed with one original metaphor after another, language that’s almost drunk with colorful, startling images. . . . Brimming with scraps of memory, regrets, and rationalizations, Shards leaves an indelible scar on the reader’s imagination. Prcic has pieced together a young man’s story from the torn and exploded remains of his former life, and the sheer power of his language leaves the reader shaken.” —Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness

“Powerful, gorgeous writing—complicated without a hint of intellectual grandstanding. This novel is a difficult treasure.” —Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Awards Committee

“Prcic captures the insanity of war and its unceasing aftermath.” —Publishers Weekly

“Brutally vivid . . . Shards [rings] true.” —Emily Harris, The Oregonian

“A playful but heartfelt debut . . . Brightly detailed . . . [Prcic is] a spirited, soulful talent.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The experience of reading Shards—the deliberate disorientation, the layering and morphing of events that characterize the book—reveals in a more visceral way what it might be like to live always with a full awareness of the tenuousness of civil society, of the terrible precariousness of calm.” —Margaux Wexberg Sanchez, St. Louis Beacon